is anyone else completely dumfounded by all of this? i mean i thought it was as simple as cut a wee hole here and there and lift your fingers off and it makes a different sound tada!!! 
Nicely put billh. I agree totally with both you and Sean Folsom. We’ve gone round and round on this so many times I can hardly…well the last time we did about 20 pages worth before leaving it unsettled.
Anyway, just to add a couple of things. You hit on it when you said the notes of the chanter are each tuned true and Just to the drone. That way any two intervals can always be pure. If the individual notes were tuned true to each other, only a few intervals would sound in tune. Luckily, we can’t hit two notes at the same time on the chanter. So why Just on u-pipe chanters and not on chromatic flutes? I think the answer to that is that neither are truely one or the other, they’re whatever you make it while you’re playing. The two systems really only show up in big differences on fixed instruments…and the piano being the ultimate because its huge frame keeps it stable. Not so much with harpsichords and their sounding boards. The best pianos have removed most of the problem with inharmonics. Strings and tubes are where we find the most distingushed partials.
And this is why it can be difficult to have drones, chanter, and regs all in tune all the time. Works best limiting it to two-note intervals, and limiting it to two or three keys…and their relative minors. The dissonance is tolerable this way.
The harmonica and box are critical because the reeds have no chamber, so to speak, to develop greater harmonics and confuse the issue. Hence the wetness, or two-reed system, to cover up the pronounced out-of-tuness you may encounter with purposely placed wavering between two reeds in intervals, esp 3rds.
Interestingly enough, when challenged to at least try and tune a piano to Just Intonation, I tried, and I only got half way through the white keys and realized the truth in what I’d been taught–that you can’t have perfect 3rds, 4ths, and 5ths together in even a diatonic scale. What happened was that starting with middle C, I tuned the upper G pure to the C (a 5th), then the D pure to the G (4th), then A pure to the D (5th), and E pure to the A (4th)…then I checked to see what the first test sounded like, C-E (3rd). The 3rd was off. In trying to make the triad totally pure, C-E-G, this brought the wolves out in the D-G interval.
So, compromise becomes necessary before you ever get into the chromatic scale–that is if attempting to tune notes pure to each other on fixed instruments. No problem if you limit it to a melody against a drone–or two note intervals where the upper note is always true to the root.
And this is the best argument that there is no God…or at least a perfect God. 
(back to lurking)
Darran,
To me, it means the pipes are in tune with themself. Play an E on the chanter and it will bend in with the D drones. Try that on a guitar and you get a big clash.
Other instruments are tuned to JI. The Cajun accordion is not ET. When the Cajuns started making and tuning the accordion there were no electonic tuners so they tuned them by ear and it came out close to JI= with the 3 and 5’th were a little flat.
In my opinion the pipes may sound better with the Cajun accordion(JI) than the ET Irish accordion, just my opinion. It just all what your ear gets use to hearing.
My ear is more use to an alternate tuning such as JI. When I tune the 5-string banjo(to G) with a electronic tuner, I will tune the B string(3rd note) a little flat, otherwise it does not sound in tune to me.
Hope my input helps. It is an interesting topic and could go on for light years… Ed
High ho !!! my fellow pipers…
As “off topic” as I made my observation on modern instruments,
I guess I’ll spell it out a little more clearly:
Modern Wind Instruments, with keys, DO NOT PLAY IN TUNE!!!
They are not in tune with equal temperment, and many hours of
practice have to be done daily, weekly, and year in and year out…to constantly adjust your scales to the Piano / Keyboard and it’s particular problems (should I mention here, about Piano tuners “stretching the octaves” and counting the beats that start about 3 seconds into the “decay” AFTER 2 notes are struck together with the hammers…look it up, it’s in any book about Piano tuning).
Now the Trombone is the “Violin of the Brasses” and it has the infinite points ON A SLIDE, that to my mind, matches the Cello fingerboard.
The trombone was the first Brass instrument I ever played, so I know about the “QUIRKS” of tuning and temperment on that “lip-reed-a-phone” as well.
If you consider that any musical scale (however it is derived) is like a mathematicaly imperfect repeating decimal, like “PI” (3.14…), and that nothing in music is ever perfectly in tune, and that many dissonant notes can have very little “harmonic weight” if they go by FAST ENOUGH (the musical term for this is “Passing Notes” which is what playing jigs and reels fast on the Pipes and never having to play a SLOW AIR gets
you) this factor lets a lot of music and musicians “off the hook” today, and in to the foreseeable future. Electronic instruments, I fear, will not save us
from some sort of out-of tune music either !
I just THANK GOD I’m just trying to play my Pipes in tune against the DRONES, and not having to worry about playing in equal temperment !!!
Sean Folsom
No arguments here. I’ll offer more uninformed amaetur piffle anyway.
I asked ‘why natural intonation’ and I got ‘drones, drones, its because of drones’…
I KNOW HOW, I WANT TO KNOW WHY!!!
Cause it sounds like crap otherwise? Ennis sez everything we play is in D. Good enough for me. I thought my point about amateurs being, you know, amateurs, salient. Swayne’s notion about False Advertising is a good one. Also the idea that the stuff in other keys was meant to be played on another instrument. O’Farrell’s is “Suitable for Union Pipes, German Flute, Violin” or some such, right? Also cut-and-pasting from other collections wasn’t unknown back then - a lot of Howe’s (1860’s) is lifted from Bunting and Petrie. Maybe some of the O’Farrell’s material was swiped from books like O’Neal’s.
I think Charles Nicholson wrote that the favorite key for amateur flautists was F natural. If that’s of any interest. The professional pipers of the past may have been able to crossfinger or open keys to modify the chanter’s temperment, too. It is believed this was the original purpose of the extra keys on the flute, too. Baroque flutes had the lone Eb key (also a D# key on some fancy instruments), other semitones were obtained by crossfingering. The original use of the keys was to help the crossfingering. Union pipe key construction was modelled after what the flutemakers were doing. Kenna and Coyne both made the occasional flute.
Blah blah blah. Hope that was worth typing out.
Read Ardell Powell’s book The Flute if you want to know more.
So in other words, the chanter is tuned to sound good against the drones - is that about it?
djm
The chanter and the regs are tuned to sound good against the drones is my understanding.
Hey Sean, good post. Yeah, in ET, the 5ths are narrowed 3 beats in 5 seconds, the 4ths are widened by 1 beat in 5 seconds. And still the 12 notes in the chromatic scale will remain equally off from each other. Strange. The human/ear brain doesn’t interpret the lower and higher notes perfectly, so we bring them in a little to make them sound good, but mathematically they’ve been stretched. Some tuners like to stretch the octave just a little too so that the 12 notes in the chromatic scale are not so far off from each other.
djm, yes that’s about it, the individual notes of the chanter would be pure to the drone. Some people get the idea that ET is really a lot different than JI.
For an experiment, try tuning a drone on a D set to a piano, so both Ds are perfectly in unison. Then play the D scale on the piano against the drone (one drone only). Then play the lower octave scale on the chanter against the drone (same drone). Which sounds better, the chanter or the piano? You may not hear much difference. The piano may actually sound better than the chanter. in which case the chanter could have any of several problems–which shows how unstable it can be. The stick may not be perfectly tuned/drilled. The reed may not be perfectly suited to the stick…or working perfect in the climate, the bag pressure for the reed may not be perfectly stable, and certain fingerings may be needed to get certain notes in tune.
I have heard that, actually, string instruments can violate this seemingly universal truth. On instruments with really thick strings, eg. harp, the thickness can change the frequency of the harmonics dispropotionately to the fundamental pitch. One result is “spread tunings” - the top and bottom octave on a harp have wider intervals than the middle octaves. But when you play chords, they sound more or less in tune.
But maybe I just misunderstood it.
Can anybody confirm?
I think so (i.e. you are misunderstanding it). Heavy strings can have resonant frequencies that are not perfectly aligned, but resonant frequencies are not the same as harmonics; when a note is sounding (continuously) the actual harmonics must be aligned regardless of the “natural” resonant frequencies. Heaviness of strings can not cause the components in the continuous frequency spectrum to become misaligned.
When plucked very hard, stringed instruments can act percussive, and in this situation the harmonics may be briefly non-aligned. However I don’t believe this has to do with the phenomenon you are describing above. With any reasonable sustain the harp harmonics (within the sound of a single string, that is) are perfect integer ratios.
As Lorenzo pointed out there are some psycho-acoustic effects that may come into play. Chords are a totally different matter, as already mentioned - they require various temperings of the tuning, such as the “spread octave” thing you mention.
Bill
All that theory and they cant retro fit a key on a chanter !!!
RORY
i played several times at a cathedral that had a german baroque style organ. playing with the organist using the flute or reed kinds of stops there was a slight bit of a clash. (which of course never bothered me in the least) when she used the separate manual which was a regal in fact, the two instruments blended seamlessly. i don’t know how the regal was tuned. just intonation i suppose.
Having waited until the heavies chime out on the topic: I want to offer my observation from a practical useability-workaday-get-the-gig-overwith-musician standpoint: (although having had to custom build timbres from scratch using sine wave operators on an additive synth in college is but a dimming memory now…maybe just a little brighter than patchcords on a modular moog…)
I suspect the UP uses JI because that’s the particular sound the pipemaker had in his head when he built the instrument. There were no strobe tuners in the 17th c., only trained ears that knew what they liked, and how to acheive that goal through craftsmanship, trial and error.
I somehow doubt that seminal Pipemakers had access to the latest thought on temperament systems until recently, and for them it was either in tune, or out, depending on the skill and training of those involved.